Egypt to Charge Officer in Killing of Shaimaa el-Sabbagh

CAIRO — Egyptian prosecutors said Tuesday that they were charging a police officer with a type of manslaughter in the shooting of a poet and activist whose killing at a peaceful demonstration made her the latest symbol of police abuse.

In a statement, prosecutors said they were charging the officer with “battery causing death” in the killing of Shaimaa el-Sabbagh with a shotgun blast of birdshot. Prosecutors also said that they would charge some of Ms. Sabbagh’s fellow protesters with staging an unauthorized demonstration and threatening the public order, crimes punishable by years in prison under a law passed shortly after the military ouster of President Mohamed Morsi in 2013.

The same statement, from the office of Public Prosecutor Hisham Barakat, also appeared to minimize at least two other allegations of police misconduct that had turned into national scandals, suggesting that the authorities might be trying to close the books on several embarrassing cases as a newly appointed interior minister, Magdy Abdel Gaffar, takes office.

The most notorious case was the killing of Ms. Sabbagh, 31, who was photographed dying in the arms of another activist at a march to lay flowers in Tahrir Square on Jan. 24, a day before the anniversary of the Arab Spring revolt here. She was a sympathetic victim: the mother of a 5-year-old boy, an accomplished poet and a leader in a secular party broadly supportive of the current government. The images of her blood-streaked face resonated so widely that even President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi joined the public calls for an inquiry.

Prosecutors then issued a gag order banning news organizations from reporting on her killing until Tuesday’s statement, which did not name the police officer charged.

In a statement, Sarah Leah Whitson, the Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, noted that under current Egyptian law, a manslaughter charge involving the killing of a demonstrator carried a similar prison term to charges against participants in an unauthorized demonstration, suggesting “a false and worrying equivalence between a peaceful protest and a fatal shooting.”

Karim Ennarah, a researcher who tracks the criminal justice system for the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, said the charges in the killing of Ms. Sabbagh were a good development toward police accountability. He noted, however, that other police officers had sometimes faced criminal charges after public outcries in high-profile abuse cases, and in the end they were very rarely convicted.

The prosecutor’s actions in the other two cases, he said, were “a shame.”

One was the death of Mohamed el-Gindy, a 28-year-old protester who was found unconscious in the street in early 2013 after he had given a television interview criticizing police brutality and mocking Mr. Morsi.

Video

Videos captured the final moments of the Egyptian activist Shaimaa al-Sabbagh’s life before and after she was shot by the police during a peaceful protest in Cairo on Jan. 24.CreditCreditEmad El-Gebaly/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In the statement, prosecutors said they had concluded that Mr. Gindy had been killed by an unidentified vehicle. The statement said a panel of five doctors had concluded that Mr. Gindy’s injuries “followed the pattern of those caused by car accidents” and “could not have possibly been caused by physical torture.”

Mr. Gindy’s family and political allies accused the police of killing him. In an investigation by The New York Times, an ambulance driver who found him and two doctors who had examined his body all said that his injuries were inconsistent with a car accident. The doctors said independently that the injuries appeared to have come from his head being slammed against a floor or a wall.

The prosecutors also said they were bringing criminal charges against a witness who said he had seen Mr. Gindy tortured inside a police camp. The witness was charged with spreading false rumors, prosecutors said.

The third case involved the death of soccer fans who were killed by asphyxiation in a stampede outside a Cairo stadium last month. Witnesses said the stampede had been set off when the police fired tear gas and birdshot into a narrow pen where the fans had been jammed waiting for a chance to enter the stadium, and photographs and video appeared to confirm their account.

No evidence has emerged of any clash with the police, who were on the other side of a chain-link barrier.

Yet in the aftermath of the stampede, prosecutors quickly began pinning the blame on leaders of a group of hard-core fans known as the Ultras White Knights. In the statement on Tuesday, prosecutors said that members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group that backed Mr. Morsi, had conspired with the Ultras White Knights to cause a riot.

Armed with “funds and explosive materials” provided by the Brotherhood, the prosecutors said, a “mob” of fans had “chanted slogans against the government,” launched fireworks at the police, injured several police officers, burned police cars and vandalized property, “prompting security forces to fire tear-gas canisters to disperse them.”

“This resulted in a state of chaos and congestion among supporters trying to enter the stadium, causing pushing and shoving and culminating in the death of several and injury of others,” the prosecutors said, adding that they had charged 16 defendants with “thuggery including murder” and other crimes.

Mr. Ennarah, the researcher, called the charges against the fans “a complete sham,” noting that there was no evidence of any clash with the police before tear gas prompted the stampede and suffocations.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Egypt to Charge Officer in Killing of an Activist. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe